TKO Creations

Talking about how sportswriters have decided they need to become the story rather than report it…

http://www.amazon.com/Those-Guys-Have-All-Fun/dp/0316043001

Yeah.  Thanks for proving my point.

On an aside… does anyone else see that the Kindle e-book price is more than the print version?  Wasn’t the transition to e-books supposed to make this stuff cheaper and easier to distribute?

… but why the hell not?

I wanted to devote this blog entirely to my fiction works, and leave my sportswriting past where it belongs, in the past… but then I read stuff like Rick Reilly and it irritates me to the point where I have to let it out.

http://espn.go.com/blog/rick-reilly-go-fish/post/_/id/946/reilly-delivers-speech-at-university-of-colorado

Rick Reilly is, to put it nicely, terrible at his job.  Taking advice from him on how to be a proper journalist is kinda like learning how to be a benevolent ruler from Muammar Gaddafi.  He bemoans that journalism schools are losing to twitter, facebook, blogs and “for free” websites.

“True, this is a new age and all these “New Media Thumbtastic Textual Revolution Departments” will someday teach everybody how to deliver the news on people’s contact lenses. I get that. 

But no matter what the medium, this whole giant digital house of cards will fold if colleges stop producing well-trained, hard-nosed reporters who dig out good stuff, make sure it’s true and then deliver it well. 

Without good journalists delivering solid stories that check out, there’ll be nothing for the world to tweet, Facebook, text, ping, blog, flog, poke, post, roast, friend, unfriend, wiki-leak, sneak peak, share, smoke signal or quilt. 

Without good journalists, this whole whirring, spinning cyber-machinery we’re all so addicted to stops colder than Rosie O’Donnell’s lingerie drawer.” 

Reilly conveniently likes to forget that this entire culture was created by the very media he is trying to champion.  They were the ones that mastered the “sound bite” and the “headline ticker,” not bloggers and twittards.

Ya want to know who is ruining the field of journalism?  Journalists.

Journalism, especially sportswriting,  is a field that has become stagnated by columnists who have decided they should become the story rather than report it… people like Mitch Albom, Drew Sharp, Bill Simmons, Skip Bayless,  Woody Paige, Mike Wilbon and yes, especially you, Mr. Reilly.

You get columns such as Albom’s work of fiction about Mateen Cleaves and Jason Richardson at the Final Four.  Drew Sharp running with quotes from Wikipedia (incorrect quotes at that) that managed to turn Rush Limbaugh into a victim (don’t try to process that… it’ll hurt your brain).  You get Bill Simmons turning ESPN into his own personal pulpit to talk about his crazy family.

And don’t get me started on that pompous, bloviating, arrogant abuser of asinine alliteration named Keith Olbermann.

But what really burned me up was this gem:

“Don’t write for free! Doctors don’t doctor for free. Professors don’t profess for free. Writers shouldn’t write for free. Have some pride! If you do it for free, they won’t respect you in the morning. Or the writer who comes along after you.”

Now, I won’t pretend I made a lot of money sportswriting.  I was a freelancer.  But I did have to do a lot of work for free if I wanted to be published.  You want to why, Ricky?  Because there are no paying jobs because of imbeciles like you that have managed to monopolize every avenue to plaster their faces in.

People like Reilly are so intent on making themselves the story that they take every chance they can to throw it out there.  It’s why you see the same 30 some odd sportswriters doing work for their host paper, radio shows, national syndicated columns, cable television, etc.  Why should a publication take a chance on a new writer when Rick Reilly is willing to whore himself out to whoever wants it?

It’s bad enough that the field is pretty damn saturated as it is.  Once you have “established” yourself; nothing more than gross misconduct is going to get you unseated.  There’s not all that much turnover in journalism, so you either write for little or for free, or you give up.  Those too stubborn to give up (like I was) write for free.

Rick Reilly then leaves us with this plea;

“Don’t take my job.”

Ricky, perhaps we should be saying that to you.

I know I had a tentative release for The Endtimers’ Legacy for this summer.

Yeah… that’s not going to happen.

I really can’t say too much about what I’m going to be doing instead, except to say that it could be pretty big, and that composition of Book 2 of the Gate Series is on indefinite hiatus while I make this new project happen.  Hopefully, I’ll have more information for you all soon.

Still no word on exactly when I’ll be moving the website.  The MegaTokyo servers are in the process of doing hardware changes, and there’s been little news on that score.  Don’t worry, I haven’t forgotten to let you all know when it does happen!

I’ll try to do better to keep in touch.  Promise.

Whelp, after one year at WordPress, it looks like I am going to be on the move soon; being absorbed into the MegaTokyo web sphere.

This is actually a good thing for me and for you readers.  Good for me in that it gives me better exposure and a potentially larger reader base, and the open support of a larger web community.

For you readers, it’s a good thing because it’s one step closer to revealing some new content that I’ve been waiting to unveil.  Some preliminary teaser work for the MegaTokyo: Endgames project is just about ready to be published to the consumption of readers at large, and it’s something that best done after the big move.

I’ll keep you all updated as to when and where the move will be made.  Keep in touch!

~Thomas

Nothing much of note, really… last night posted the latest short story, Special Assignments Force 3, and did some reformatting of the first five short stories to match the formatting of the last five.

But on other news, I have heard the cries of the reading public, and an working on making html forms of all the material on this site.  I’m not fond of how html tends to format text (one of the reasons I stuck with .pdf for as long as I have), but if you all are willing to accept it, then I will as well.  Stay tuned for those new links coming!

This is something I have wanted to stay as far away from as humanly possible, partly because I’m reaching the conclusion that there is no way to approach it that doesn’t have me come across as either a hateful bastard propagating a culture or a reactionary who flinches at the slightest hint of controversy or off-color behavior.

I have recently been asked to include a “trigger warning” to the Second Gate due to the events of the Sultry Siren within the novel, as the events that occur are demeaning and border on sexual assault.  I won’t deny this is true… it has the potential to be a degrading scene, and the “hero’s” response to it isn’t exactly the most thoughtful.

On one hand, I understand how it could be troubling to someone.  It’s not meant to be a kind scene… it is meant to be a bit troubling.  Timothy’s calculated response is also supposed to be a bit unsettling to the reader.  That’s the way I intended it to be.

It’s part of the growth of all the primary characters involved.  We don’t always make the “best” or “most noble” choice.  That’s just as true in life as it is in my fiction.

But as much as I feel for those who might be bothered, I’m not going to try and police myself by adding trigger warnings to my work.  I honestly believe if I were to do that, I would never stop.  In “Worlds Apart”, we see one of the main characters being a target of a violently racist group.  Should I add a trigger warning for those who have been on the receiving end of such prejudice?

Homosexuality is going to be a particularly strong theme in The Endtimers’ Legacy, and it’s not always going to be a positive experience.  Should I add that trigger warning to that?  What about the violence in most of the stories I’ve written so far?  Someone who has been abused by the church probably would be troubled to read the very strong religious themes.  Does that deserve a trigger warning as well?

I do apologize for anyone who is reading this and thinks I’m being heartless, because in all honesty, I think I’m being exactly the opposite.  If I were to start down this path, all I would do is worry about who might be traumatized by the particular passage I am writing.  That’s not somewhere I want (or can afford) to go.  I can’t make an exception for one person, and tell others “I’m sorry, but your bad experience isn’t as important as this other person’s bad experience.”

It’s either all or nothing; and I simply don’t have the time for all.

I feel that writing is our challenge to the world, and that goes for the warts and wrinkles as well as what we think is good.  Yes, I am going to show those rough parts of our lives.  I am going to describe (likely in detail) some very troubling events; because that is how a writer invokes a response… that’s part of how he gets readers to feel and care about the lives and actions of fictional characters.

So perhaps it would be simplest to say that there is a very high likelihood that something at some point in the works I have written or will write in the future will trouble you.  It may very well trouble you profoundly, and it will also be very likely that it was my intent to do so.  That is how I write, that is what I feel is part of the point of writing.  That’s not going to change.

Thank you for listening.

~Thomas Knapp